Every aspect of a game communicates something about the overall experience of the game. It’s very easy, and very common, for these signals to be confusing and conflicted: Yet it’s hard to say definitively that these conflicts are flaws or…
Television has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. No longer bound to the yoke of short run times and advertisements, TV shows have started becoming more like movies: Longer, more intricate, with a consistent story told between…
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
Games tend to offer us questions just so they can supply the answers. In life, a vast amount of information is lost forever. Most of it is unimportant: For most people, it’s impossible to know, say, what they had for…
There’s an issue I’ve noticed comes up a lot in game design, particularly when it comes to balancing items and abilities against each other: The differentiation and conflation of absolute and relative values. Here’s the first place I noticed it:…
Dark souls is frequently described as masochistically difficult. I don’t think this is very apt: Masochism implies a state of being acted upon, of being made to suffer by an outside force. Dark Souls never makes you do anything, only…
Progress has been going slow, but it’s progressing. I’ve been slowly building up the behavior code for this enemy type, but I realized a couple of days ago that I’m probably going to need a robust pathfinding solution rather than…
As alluded to yesterday, I’ve been feeling somewhat off of my game recently. The good news is that, while I thought there were two major bugs in the collision detection system, they may have had a common cause since fixing…
Made bits of progress in lots of different areas this week. I started off working on the tilesets, but quickly realized that tiles by themselves would probably look pretty lousy for representing more natural looking environments, of which the starting…
The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling…
